In recent years electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been the focus of significant attention as Internet-related sales grew at rates of 25 percent or more. Despite this in 2006 overall online sales within the US excluding travel purchases, represented only approximately 6 percent of US retail sales. In 2007 including travel this figure is expected to increase 18 percent to approximately US$260 billion.
“US Retail E-Commerce: Entering the Multi-Channel Era” published by e-Marketer in May 2007 outlines the prevalent trend for consumers to use the Internet as a product research tool. Hence, at present retailers who effectively build bridges between their stores and web sites stand to be the big winners in the research-online/buy-in-store era. Hampering e-commerce, and therefore its growth, is the prevalent view of users that e-commerce has many privacy and security issues, of which a central aspect is that there is no reliable way to ensure that the website a user wishes to access, make purchases therefrom, or provide personal information to is in fact the correct website and not an imposter purporting to be the intended target website. The non-physical nature of the Internet renders traditional methods of physically marking media with a seal or signature, for various business, commerce, and legal purposes, not practical. Rather, some mark must be coded into the information itself in order to identify the source and authenticate the contents.
In commerce, whether online or face-to-face, the client and the merchant must provide identification, authentication and authorization. Identification is the process that enables recognition of a user described to an automated data processing system and authentication is the act of verifying the claimed identity of an individual, station or originator, and finally authorization is the granting of the right of access to a user, program, or process.
Prior art solutions to the problems of identification, authentication, confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation in information systems have focused heavily on the application of cryptography and/or so-called “Smart Cards”. For confidentiality, encryption is used to scramble information sent between users so that eavesdroppers cannot understand the data's content. Authentication usually employs digital signatures to identify the author of a message such that the recipient of the message can verify the identity of the person who signed the message. Digital signatures can be used in conjunction with passwords or as an alternative to them.
Message integrity, if considered, is typically determined by methods that verify that a message has not been modified, such as by using message digest codes. Non-repudiation describes the creation of cryptographic receipts so that an author of a message cannot falsely deny sending a message. Thus the Internet reveals the full complexity of trust relationships among people, computers, and organizations.
Today, the dominant approach to authentication by digital signatures uses public-key cryptographic techniques employing two related keys, a public key and a private key. In public-key cryptography, the public key is made available to anyone who wants to correspond with the owner of the corresponding private key. The public key can be used to verify a message signed with the private key or encrypt messages that can only be decrypted using the private key. The secrecy of messages encrypted this way, and the authenticity of the messages signed this way relies on the security of the private key. Thus, the private key is kept secret by the owner in order to protect the key against unauthorized use.
Traditionally “Smart Cards” have been used as signing tokens for authenticating a user, wherein “Smart Cards” is merely an alternative name for a microprocessor card, in that it refers to a card that is ‘smart’, and is not to be confused with the registered trademark of Groupmark. “Smart Cards” place digital certificates, cryptographic keys and other information on a PIN-protected token carried by the end-user, which is more secure than storing it on a computer device which may be vulnerable to unauthorized access.
All the cryptographic algorithms involving the private key such as digital signatures and key exchanges are performed on the card. However, whilst users are assured a modicum of integrity and privacy of the data exchanged they are trusting that the website they are accessing really is the one they want and not a malicious website. One reason cryptographic algorithms have become so widespread is the fact that the private key need not be revealed outside of the token. However, one of the disadvantages of “Smart Cards” is that the owner is not protected from abuse of the “Smart Card”. For example, because of the lack of a user interface, such as a display screen, the owner may not be sure about the originating server of the actual message being signed with the “Smart Card”. Accordingly for example, a user executing a purchase with eBay does not know that the form requesting details of a financial instrument, such as a credit card, is actually being provided by a Korean webpage rather than the legitimate webpage.
Another approach adopted in the prior art has been to eliminate the “Smart Card” and implement the solutions by means of a personalized device, such as a wireless application protocol (WAP) capable mobile phone or wireless personal digital assistant (PDA), the personalized devices then providing the signing token. Such a personalized device can store private key and sign transactions on behalf of its owner. In such a situation, the holder of the personalized device is assumed to be its rightful owner or authorized representative as determined by an appropriate access-control mechanism, and further the information being provided is assumed to be coming from the legitimate web server or web page rather than a malicious source.
However, there exists substantial risk for fraud in either approach. In the first approach when the message is prepared on a PC and conveyed to the personalized device the integrity of the message may be compromised. This scenario applying for instance where the client wishes to use the larger viewing area or speed of the PC to perform the browsing, item selection and transaction aggregation, prior to completing the transaction on the personalized device by signing. The signed data message is transmitted via the personalized device. The personalized device thus acts both as a signing token and as a transmitting device. In this situation, it is assumed that the external computer can be trusted and that this computer does not contain malicious software (malware) or has been programmed by unscrupulous individuals to alter the content of the message. Should the data presented for signing on the personalized device contain different information from that displayed, then the owner of the private key would then sign fraudulent or financially harmful transactions. A common malware being the so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack (MITM) and incorporating phishing and substitution attacks.
In the second situation, wherein all activities are contained within the personalized device then one potential fraud arises when the personalized device operating system becomes corrupted, such as, by unintentionally installed software containing malicious code, script embedded in messages, or by compromise of the personalized device operating system via security holes. This malware can then alter the contents of transactions, as described above. Further, there is greater potential for fraud as transactions could be created, signed, and transmitted without the owner evening being aware they are occurring. For the client it would be very difficult, as prima facie the personalized device's owner appears to have sanctioned the data message by appending a valid signature.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to mitigate these disadvantages by establishing a secure trusted path between a client and a secure transaction server disposed between client and the institution seeking an electronic signature before any request for signature and electronic transaction activities occur. The present invention therein utilizing the secure trusted path to provide the client with an image or an indication of an image on a personalized device that cannot be intercepted, inserted, or manipulated by malware to verify that the image within the displayed transaction on the clients primary computing device, such as a PC is authentic.